It looks like North Shoal Creek’s Neighborhood Plan has dates set for public hearings on 10 and 26 APR.
Should FAN support or oppose Neighborhood Plans in general, and NSC’s specifically?
If we have a membership ballot for items soon, I’d like to see if there’s interest in getting this on the ballot for members to be able to speak on it during the public hearings.
http://austintexas.gov/northshoalcreek
The draft North Shoal Creek Neighborhood Plan will go to Planning Commission on April 10th and City Council on April 26th for review and adoption. Both hearings will be in City Council Chambers at City Hall (301 West 2nd Street, Austin, Texas). The draft plan is available for review in PDF format (15MB file). The draft plan will also be available for review at the North Village Branch Library. The draft FLUM is available here. Comments from the Open House and Final Survey are available here.
Stay tuned for announcements regarding the formal adoption process.
The North Shoal Creek neighborhood planning area is bounded by Anderson Lane, Mopac, US 183, & Burnet Road.
Yeah, I think we need a member ballot ASAP on:
- $300mm for housing [a few of us still working on specifics and language for that]
- MLS at McCalla
- North Shoal Creek.
Ideally we need polls to close before the NP goes to PC…so, Sunday 4/8?
Let’s try to get these ready to go in the next day or two so to leave enough time to vote.
Thanks for posting this!
I think we should oppose the North Shoal Creek plan and small area plans in general. Looking at the existing zoning and what the FLUM says I don’t see a difference. If no planning for the future went into the plan, I don’t understand what the point of it is?
Does anyone want to come up with the language of the vote for this and someone come up with the language for MLS at McCalla? Without language to vote on, then we can’t have a vote. =)
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@chris78701, @Pete_Gilcrease, @rcauvin, going back a ways, and in a positive tone, I thought we were closer to something like this:
FAN supports the creation of neighborhood plans that are consistent with and demonstrably support Imagine Austin’s community level goals. Plan documents should open with a quantitative summary of how this will be achieved using the complete community indicators as the IA agreed upon benchmark
Not proposing this wording, just suggest we propose what the objective should be, or where the bar should be set, and where this ‘plan’ fell short.
Keep in mind that FANs already took a general position on neighborhood planning and contact teams, so we would probably want to avoid redundancy in a new resolution. One approach is for the new resolution to be specific to North Shoal Creek but carefully reflect and reference the previously-adopted, more general recommendations. I would certainly urge that it be consistent with the previously-adopted position unless we want to overturn or amend it.
Does anyone want to come up with wording for North Shoal Creek’s Neighborhood Plan? It doesn’t have to be anything complicated. Maybe just something about opposing the current version for a few reasons and asking for a more inclusive plan. Even if the vote won’t close until after the planning commission meeting with it now (who know if that would be delayed or happen at multiple meetings), we’d have something for council.
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I do think it’s worth weighing in specifically on this one. Especially given that we’re about to send out a ballot anyway for the bond.
Let’s focus on two things:
- The North Shoal Creek Neighborhood Plan says one of its main goals is keeping multifamily housing away from single-family housing and preserving the physical structures. This is not a legitimate policy goal, and we should not pass neighborhood plans that endorse it as a main prioty
- The Plan bans most kinds of residential housing from most of the land. We should not be approving neighborhood plans what have the effect of banning three-story apartment buildings from any part of the neighborhood.
This Plan builds a wall around the middle of the neighborhood and makes the renters pay for it. It must not be allowed to pass in its current form.
We would support an alternative plan that allowed the kind of residential housing that most of the neighborhood’s residents live in everywhere in the neighborhood and not just on its edges, and removed the language about “preserving character” from the statement of its goals.
I guess we already have voted on this with the Neighborhood Planning resolution. Can’t we just take that vote and apply it here? It might be too redundant to have a vote on every variation of every issue that happens. We could just take almost exactly what Josiah said, reference our Neighborhood Planning vote, and send that to the planning commission?
Oh, forgot, we should also specifically ask for a postponement until more outreach and engagement can be done to renters (and until we settle on a framework in CodeNEXT). Nina and I knocked on like 400 doors in the neighborhood a couple weeks ago and nobody had heard of it. Going to email the couple dozen people from that we have info for and see if any of them can come speak to that.
I think that could work, but I would suggest being very explicit in tying the specific objections regarding the North Shoal Creek neighborhood plan back to the positions that FANs empowered the organization to take in the more general resolution. A vote of the membership on such as statement would still be more powerful, in my opinion, and it would reinforce FAN’s “representation” pillar.
To be clear – I want FAN to explicitly condemn the content of this particular neighborhood plan not just (actually, more than) the process that created it.
What about something like the following that the board could send to the planning commission?
Friends of Austin Neighborhoods requests a postponement for the North Shoal Creek Neighborhood Plan until more outreach and engagement can be done to renters and until the city council determines what Austin’s future growth will look like under the new land development code CodeNEXT.
- The North Shoal Creek Neighborhood Plan says one of its main goals is keeping multifamily housing away from single-family housing and preserving the physical structures. This is not a legitimate policy goal, and we should not pass neighborhood plans that endorse it as a main priority
- The Plan bans most kinds of residential housing from most of the land. We should not be approving neighborhood plans what have the effect of banning three-story apartment buildings from any part of the neighborhood.
This Plan builds a wall around the middle of the neighborhood and makes the renters pay for it. It must not be allowed to pass in its current form. We would support an alternative plan that allowed the kind of residential housing that most of the neighborhood’s residents live in everywhere in the neighborhood and not just on its edges, and removes the language about “preserving character” from the statement of its goals.
Friends of Austin Neighborhoods membership voted on and approved Neighborhood Planning and Contact Team Recommendations based on the The recent Audit of Neighborhood Plans and Contact Teams. The Audit says that our current neighborhood planning processes are “inequitable and have lacked robust and representative participation,” that neighborhood planning contact teams (NPCTs) “create barriers to public engagement and representative decision-making,” that neighborhood “plans are not consistent with some elements of Imagine Austin,” and that “fair housing choice has not been specifically considered in most neighborhood planning efforts.” The North Shoal Creek Neighborhood Plan does not address these inequities and these exclusionary principles are continued with this plan.
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Thank you for putting something together, @Pete_Gilcrease! I have transferred the contents to a Google doc here. I plan to make a few relatively minor tweaks.
Please use “Suggesting” mode to suggest any changes to the document.
The letter looks good. Was this already sent or presented at PC?
If not, PC has this on the agenda tomorrow. I would likely be able to go and present but it might be better coming from someone on the board.
Kaz
Also, this statement inspired me to make a meme:
“‘preserving neighborhood character’ with enhancing neighborhood character, and it would no longer relegate diverse housing and people to the edges”
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